What's Wrong with Being "Woke?"

Short answer: Absolutely nothing.

The History of "Woke"

The term "woke" has a long history, rooted in Black American culture, of meaning being consciously aware of racism, discrimination, and the social forces that shape people's lives. The expression "stay woke" first appeared in Black newspapers and writing in the early 20th century

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the early 2020's, saw the term experience a major resurgence. "Stay woke" became widely used on social media, again as a call to remain alert to racism, police violence, and systemic inequality. From there, its meaning expanded beyond race to encompass awareness of other forms of social and cultural injustice, including sexism, LGBTQ+ discrimination, economic inequality, and environmental concerns.

However, as woke entered mainstream culture, it also became politically charged. While the term continued to be used positively to describe social consciousness and empathy, others began using "woke" derisively to describe what they saw as intolerable empathic ideology.

Who Would Reject Empathy?

We all grow up with various types of unresolved childhood, religious, and ancestral traumas. Their effects will vary depending on one's temperament and chosen soul lessons. Ultimately, how we process trauma divides us unconsciously into two groups of people: Sensitive or Callous, with a spectrum of personalities within each group. Neither label is an ego judgment of one's worthiness or lovability.

The Sensitive person's trauma taught them to become more empathetic, compassionate and protective of people to prevent them from more suffering. However, the Callous person, with their trauma from a void of love in childhood, develop such self-hate that they subconsciously want others to be treated as miserably as they were.

While Sensitive people want everyone to be treated fairly, humanely and receive justice for past wrong doings against marginalized groups of people, Callous people don't want people to receive benefits from the government, and have no choice but to view compassion and empathy negatively because they don't possess the emotional ability to feel another's pain.

"Anti-Woke" vs. "Woke"

Combine all these Callous people projecting their self-hate along with Woke's past racial history, and today's anti-woke movement becomes racist. Members of the callous anti-woke movement hold a great deal of guilt and shame over slavery and would rather no one talk about it. Removing Black history and studies from school and university curriculum solved that problem.

Anti-Woke also directs discrimination against every marginalized group of people. Immigrants, Muslims, Gays, Trans, Lesbians and Latinos start the list. People become Callous because they grow up without the freedom to express themselves authentically. Any group of people that expresses what the Callous can't, immediately becomes the enemy. The void of love Callous people grow up with makes them extremely insecure and only feel safe around people who look like themselves. Any non-white group is a target, which adds to the racist nature of the Anti-Woke' Movement and makes it a hate group.

By contrast, the Woke Movement doesn't support discrimination towards any group of people. Yes, the Sensitive 'woke' crowd stages peaceful protests, but defending yourself against hate isn't hate; it's survival. Woke people see the world with an open heart and can live comfortably amongst people who don't look like them in their neighborhood. Being woke is about supporting equality, compassion and justice.

Yes, there are instances where a Callous type of person can be woke, but there will never be a Sensitive person supporting anti-woke ideology.

What if "Woke" Just Meant "Human?"

Perhaps being "woke" isn't really about belonging to an ideology at all. At its most fundamental level, it's simply about being human enough to notice what's happening around you—and to care. Human beings are born with an innate capacity for empathy, responding to another person's pain, recognize unfairness, protect those who are vulnerable, and form bonds with people outside our immediate families and tribes. Those who developed a shattered ego cannot.

We teach children to share, to include the person standing alone, and to speak up when someone is being bullied. We may use contemporary language to describe these impulses—awareness, inclusion, social justice, equality—but the underlying behaviors are ancient. Long before the word "woke" entered our vocabulary, human beings were helping one another, challenging cruelty, and imagining a world in which the vulnerable could be treated with dignity. These traits are encoded in our DNA.

Being woke can also mean willing to question what we've been taught. Curiosity is one of our most deeply human traits. Every generation discovers that some assumptions inherited from the previous generation were incomplete, mistaken, or harmful. We evolve by asking questions: Is this fair? Who's being left out? Why do we treat these people differently? Could there be another way? That willingness to look beyond our own experience is part of how human consciousness grows.

For the anti-woke, can hating everyone and everything be the ultimate divinely sanctioned human state on earth? It doesn't sound like an enjoyable life focused on hating something. While everyone has free will to live out of sync with their human nature without judgment, a life focused on insecurities, doesn't seem as empowering as one focused on developing inner strength and character.

There's also something profoundly human about moving beyond the instinct to divide the world into "us" and "them." The ego naturally seeks identity, belonging, certainty, and security. For the insecure, it can feel safer to see themselves as part of one group and someone else as belonging to another. But beneath those false identities is something remarkably simple: we all experience love, fear, loneliness, joy, loss, hope, and the desire to be seen and accepted. The differences we use to separate ourselves don't erase the deeper commonality of being human.

Seen this way, being "woke" doesn't have to mean adopting a particular political identity. It can simply describe a movement of consciousness: becoming more aware of ourselves, more aware of other people, and more aware of the invisible assumptions that shape the way we experience the world. It's the willingness to keep opening our eyes to the very human capacity to awaken to our interconnectedness and recognize another person not as an abstraction, an enemy, or a category, but as another human being. If you have a desire to reconnect deeply with your innate humanity that might be hidden, there is a solution.

Discover Your Humanity

You're not broken, only disconnected. Unresolved trauma makes both Woke or Anti-Woke grow up disconnected from self-love, our natural human spirituality and power source. The ego is damaged and we create a survival personality to fulfill unmet needs and validation.

If being "woke" can be understood in its deeper sense as becoming more conscious—more aware of ourselves, more compassionate toward others, and less controlled by the unconscious patterns we have inherited—then Steve Fogelman's Your Trauma Healing Journey: Lifeprint Reiki's Guide to Reconnecting to Self-Love offers an interesting pathway into that kind of awakening. The book begins with the premise that we are not fundamentally broken, but can become disconnected from our innate capacity for self-love through unresolved trauma and the survival behaviors that develop around it. Its approach invites readers to look beneath those behaviors with curiosity rather than judgment, using self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-compassion as tools for reconnecting with a more authentic sense of self.

From this perspective, healing becomes a form of waking up. We begin to notice the fears, defenses, assumptions, and identities that have quietly shaped how we see ourselves and other people. Instead of automatically reacting from old wounds, we can pause and ask, What's really happening inside me? Is this response coming from who I am, or from something I learned to do in order to feel safe? This approach encourages introspection through reflection prompts and practical exercises associated with the book's "11 Insights to Happiness," including bringing aspects of the shadow self into greater awareness.

Ultimately, the book's message is that the qualities we're searching for—compassion, authenticity, self-acceptance, connection, and love—are things that already exist beneath the protective layers we developed while trying to survive. "Your Trauma Healing Journey" offers a way of reconnecting with that deeper self to rediscover the human being who was there all along.